Chattanooga prides itself with being the home of college football’s I-AA championship game, the Spring Fling for scholastic sports (sometimes), the regional cheerleading championships, and the occasional gun show, but the Tivoli Theatre may have ushered in a new era for the city by hosting the national tour opening of the musical Dr. Dolittle starring and directed by nine-time Tony Award winner Tommy Tune. The 80-year-old grand dame of local performing venues never looked finer as a near-capacity crowd was the first to witness the re-constituted show based on the 1967 Oscar-winning Twentieth Century Fox film.
There is nothing quite like the energy of an opening night live theatre audience for a brand new show. Hit or miss, the room is electric with anticipation, and Chattanooga let no one down with a truly energized crowd who seemed enthralled at being asked to participate in the launching. Even Mayor Ron Littlefield showed up proclamation in hand to dub the festivities as part of an official “Dr. Dolittle/Tommy Tune Day.”
The costume and prop departments for the production were actually set up in the lobby as this was a large-scale musical production that had established its HQ in the building to provide the final touches in the creation of a production that will be on the road nationally for many months. Next stop: Houston. This gave everyone a first-hand feel for being part of the process.
Being a legitimate tryout town, where productions both work out the final creative kinks and test themselves in front of the ultimate arbiters (the audience), can be quite a distinction. I lived for many years in New Haven, Conn., where its Shubert Theater was part of the traditional out-of-town tryout circuit of Boston-New Haven-Philadelphia for shows headed for Broadway. Many shows appearing there through the years are now household words. Many others are vanished completely. Some never made it to the Big Apple at all.
But that is all part of the process. When people talk about a “manufacturing base,” why not include national or Broadway-bound shows in that category. If you don’t think this could be a goldmine, think again. Phantom of the Opera just surpassed Cats as the longest-running show in Broadway history. It has over $3 billion in gross ticket sales. And this doesn’t count the money spent on hotels, food, and everything else.
Eat your heart out Titanic.
Actually, the Tivoli has hosted some premieres during its colorful and varied history, including Gypsy with Tyne Daley, but they were few and far between. Now, with all the renewed emphasis on promotion of the arts downtown, Chattanooga should really get in there and try to make this a regular sort of event. If the Dr. Doolittle internal production buzz is that this city is a good and hospitable place to get things going, there might quickly be a back up of production trailer trucks coming down I-75.
Tommy Tune, performing in the title role, is one of America’s great stage presences. Standing 6’6”, he is quite literally able to fill the stage by himself with one or two leg extensions. He thoroughly charmed the opening night audience from beginning to end, including a short curtain speech describing his first visit to Chattanooga as a small boy and staying in a hotel above the clouds. Dr. Doolittle was his second visit, but he promised to come back.
Dr. Dolittle, while a fictional character created by Hugh Lofting, is perhaps the world’s most famous veterinarian. He professes a difficulty communicating with and curing humans, so he opts for attending to animals and spends fifteen years learning their over 200 languages. This gives him special insight into their medical dilemmas and makes him a much sought-after personage in the animal world. He can understand them. If you have ever had a pet, you know that there is some basis of truth in the idea that animals can talk and that they try to talk to us, sometimes with limited success.
Many of the animals were portrayed by puppets with fully visible handlers, an Oriental theatre technique used so effectively in the musical The Lion King. My particular favorite was Matthew Crole and his handling of Gub-Gub the pig. His expressive snorting was delightful, as was Gub-Gub’s despair over the prospects of dieting for health reasons.
The plot centers around Dr. Doolittle being tried for murder, since he was seen throwing what appeared to be a women into the Bristol Channel where she presumably drowned. It turns out he was actually throwing a seal into the water, so she could be reunited with her boy friend seal in the Arctic. Doolittle has a romantic interest named Emma Fairfax, portrayed by Dee Hoty, who starts out their relationship as merely an irritated neighbor who can’t stand all the raucous animal noises perpetually emanating from Doolittle’s medical study where he sees his many patients. She eventually realizes that there is more to the man than just a cloud of zoological cacophony.
The story proceeds on two fronts, the love story and a spiritual journey of a man trying to reconcile the demands of nature with the demands of society. Sometimes, these sorts of folks end up ship-wrecked on a remote island, which is where Dolittle ends up as part of a quest to find both a legendary snail and an enchanted lunar moth. The Monkey Monkey Island dance is another show highlight.
All in all, the Tivoli did itself proud, and it will be of great interest to see where the Dr. Doolittle production quest ends up, but we will always be able to say that it stated here in Chattanooga.
Bart Whiteman
Bartwhiteman@aol.com